Tag Archives: Paul Ryan

Our Boy Donny, Now Wearing the Scent of a Loser

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As of dawn Wednesday November 7 we entered the “Donald Trump is unequivocally a loser” phase of this tragi-comic farce. You and I have known this for a long time, going back to his multiple-bankruptcy days in Jersey casinos. But now it gets more interesting. A lot more interesting. Because now his world leader peers and heretofore gutless Republican leadership have hard evidence that the guy is not only the fool they always knew him to be, but a toxic fool teetering on the brink of what is likely an extremely fast and inevitably crushing downhill slide.

Even Trump knows this, I truly believe.

Look at it this way: he’s a character, a “brand”, built almost entirely on gross exaggeration, absurd misrepresentation and outright fraud. He’s never been what he claimed to be, only what some of the media and public wanted him to be. (The serious New York and national press have been fitful at best in assessing their responsibility in the co-creation of the Trump myth over all his years as a ubiquitous, gaudy socialite.)

Not being utterly stupid, Trump — as we know from his estranged biographer — has always been keenly aware of being stiff-armed by New York’s truly wealthy and (somewhat less flagrantly) corrupt. His thin-veneer aristocratic stylings far too gauche for the city’s truly wealthy and well-bred. Everything about him, his self-baked celebrity status, the licensing of his name, his TV career has been dependent on his “brand” of being “a winner.”

But “a winner” he is not anymore, and everyone can see that. The only crowd clinging to the myth is he himself, his family (maybe) and his base, i.e. MAGA Goober Nation. Deep within FoxNews and Rush Limbaugh world, I suspect even they know what’s gone down.

This is new. We haven’t been here before. Republicans, for example, had no choice but play along as long as he was demonstrating an ability to drive goobers to the polls and win elections. But politics, especially among the most craven and cynical, which describes Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan to a “T”, is absolutely merciless when your mojo evaporates and you lose the scent of a winner. Friends can’t abandon you fast enough.

And in Trump’s case, combined with what may end up a 38-39 seat Democratic wave in the House and Senate losses in Arizona, Nevada and Montana, the scent of loser is settling on him like a wool coat downwind from a Nebraska feedlot.

International leaders — political animals all of them — are as familiar with a loser’s scent as anyone here in the States. Where until last week they had to play along and patronize Trump the Fool as America’s guy at the table, not knowing how long the clown show was going to last, they now know Robert Mueller and House Democrats are going to lay siege to the Trump Myth and expose it for the unsophisticated fraud it has always been. That reality makes Trump not only eminently ignorable as a peer, but a rich target for moral opposition, as France’s Emmanuel Macron did in his anti-nationalist speech — to Trump’s face — last weekend.

Most importantly, and worrisome, Trump himself now knows the jig is up. His behavior in the past week, at that press conference, outside the White House under the chopper blades, tweeting about California’s wildfires and blowing off WWI memorial events in France screams of a guy in the throes of a humiliation that he is defenseless to stop from consuming him … like a wildfire, you might say.

His Republican “friends”, having seen what playing cozy with Trump did for them in every precinct with a population density greater than 10 cows per square mile, have no reason at all to take any more bullets for him or block juggernaut investigations, even if they could.

Point being, until now we haven’t seen Trump-backed-into-a-corner recklessness. We soon will.

All Trump has today is the right-wing media and his base.

And both of them will drift away as they get sick of all the losing.

 

 

Paul Ryan Cashes In

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Raise your hand if you’re surprised Paul Ryan wants to spend more time with his family.

As a “small government conservative” Ryan has spent essentially all of his adult life cashing government checks, (with those sweet, sweet government health care benefits). His ascension to national influence is due primarily to his deft cooperation with and service to Wisconsin’s and then the country’s wealthiest citizen benefactors. His promise to them has forever been two-fold. A: Repeated rounds of tax relief followed by, B: a dramatic gutting of social services, otherwise known as social spending “reform”.

Having delivered the former, in a package that guarantees a return to trillion-dollar deficits, he has in effect accomplished both, and can now dump the daily aggravation of his political gig in favor of a Tim Pawlenty/Norm Coleman style pay-off in the private sector, or put another way, by going to work directly for the .1%-ers who have kept him in DC for 20-plus years.

(Ryan achieves a fresh gutting of social services to poorer Americans by driving deficits up so high conservatives have fresh horrifying numbers to rage and rail that “spending is out of control” … once Democrats are back in power and red ink matters again.)

As loathsome as Freedom Caucus torch-carriers like Mark Meadows and Jim Jordan are, they are at least naked about their subservience to Robert Mercer-scale political “investors”. What’s always disgusted me about Ryan is his snake oil image of a serious, concerned public servant all the while he consents to the same noxious policies promoted by the truly shameless wing nuts of the modern conservative movement.

Very much like Newt Gingrich before him, Ryan is “what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like.”

Besides seizing the cash-out phase of his career, Ryan, being another character who is all about self-serving political calculus, knows that campaigning as a Republican this year is not going to be any fun. Not with Donald Trump looking ever more like a delusional third-tier mob boss and anger at DC descending from swamp to sewer more intense than it has been in a century. Even as Speaker of the House, Ryan was not going to have a pleasant time out in public in his own district. Like Erik Paulsen and Jason Lewis here in Minnesota, he knew public appearances with an actual cross-section of voters was going to be an extraordinarily perilous experience.

I’m still not convinced that a giant “blue wave” is going to sweep across the land this November. There are hundreds of millions in dark money available to spread any hysteria imaginable to prevent that from happening.

But clearly Ryan, the calculator, (aka “the zombie-eyed granny starver”  TM Charlie Pierce), has read smoke signals on the horizon and decided that moving now to profiteer off his “public service” is a far better option than being screamed at and vilified across southern Wisconsin.

 

 

Good God! This Country Needs a Better Class of Fools.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 2Lord, what a farce! The collapse of “repeal and replace”, the GOP’s single biggest campaign/fund raising promise was even more chaotic and Looney Tune-ish than anyone could have ever imagined. After the “Freedom” Caucuses’ debt ceiling government shut down a couple years ago I didn’t think it possible for the inmates to have more control over the asylum.

But as usual, I was wrong. There is no depth of absurdity this crowd can’t sink to.

But yeah, I grossly underestimated the ability of 2017’s “Party of Lincoln” to be even more detached from reality, even more indifferent to the day-to-day miseries of their irredeemably ill-informed base and even less embarrassed to be caught out in public fully de-pantsed, ethically and intellectually. Good god! Whatever happened to a concern for personal dignity?

After six and a half years of shrieking and howling and vowing and promising, after 60+ time-sucking votes and an election that handed the red-faced, spittle-flecked repeal-istas control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they still screwed this up.

This country needs a better class of fools.

Trump, the master deal maker, put less effort into this than his weekend golf trips to Mar-a-Lago. A couple rallies in Hillybilly Elegy Holler, a few phone calls and … wow! … a trip all the up to Capitol Hill to make a few veiled threats to the Tri-Corner Hat Caucus. The boy’ll need a long rest after all that exertion. But we’ve already established that Trump is too easily distracted and lazy to do even minimal homework on policy details … even on a plan to flip 20% of the American economy on its head. So his lack of preparation and effort is not too surprising.

But, come on! Paul Ryan!? WTF?

Because he’s the latest Republican example of … what dumb people think a smart guy sounds like … I assumed that he at least, after seven goddam years, had come up with a plan that papered over the hostilities (and stupidity) within his own party. I mean, what kind of an imbecile slaps his face and reputation on something as colossally under-negotiated as the thing he whipped out 36 days ago? (BTW. Obamacare: 383 days of negotiating/legislating after literally decades of smart people fussing over minute details. TrumpRyanCare: 36 days and quite obviously little-to-no-effort wrestling the Rubik’s Cube of conflicting issues into stasis.)

This would be a joke if it weren’t so sick. After all, this crowd is now “running” everything. And now comes “tax reform.”

Trump’s Red Hat Brigade, hootin’ and hollerin’ at basketball arenas in coal country will continue to believe anything he tells them, as long as he says he’s sticking it to the terrorists and everybody who is getting gubmint services … other than them. But Ryan, a guy who has spent his entire adult life on gubmint payrolls (sweet pension, dude) and arrived in Congress thanks largely to cash from insurance companies, (Northwestern Mutual being Exhibit A) and the financial “services” industry, (and oh yeah, and this trucking dude) has some serious ‘splainin’ to do.

Everyone who can accurately spell “Make America Great Again” knows this Trump/RyanCare health care shtick had almost nothing to do with improving the quality of care Americans get and lowering prices, and everything to do with clawing back the $100 billion a year in taxes Obamacare was sucking out of our valiant job creators/major campaign donors.

Pundits are squalling about how “stupid” it was to “go after health care first”, instead of “tax reform” and “regulatory reform”. (Those last two are hoary code-language for more unfettered profit-taking with much less “redistribution” of wealth.)

But as Ryan very well knows, getting “tax reform”, by which we mean a new round of epic, deficit-blowing George W. Bush-style tax cuts for the plutocrats who keep Ryan in office, is a hell of a lot harder to do without being able to balance things out — marketing-wise — with the $1 trillion (over ten years) in Obamacare “savings.” The numbers just get too ugly too fast.

No doubt Ryan will try, because … well, because he has no other choice. “Tax reform” is, and always is, Issue #1, for “principled conservatives.” The Kochs and the Mercers and everyone else buffing their yachts for cruising season have paid good money to keep Ryan in office and he had damned well better deliver, no matter how ridiculous he sounds explaining the exploding deficit.

He of course has the benefit of  the rubes writing rubber checks for breakfast at Denny’s, because that crowd always thinks Republicans are talking about them when they hear “tax cuts”. But Ryan has to be calculating the fired-up Trump resistance, which is far more energized then it was back in George W.’s day and is smelling blood with this farcically garish “repeal and replace” defeat. Expect a lot of loud, ugly noise about deficits and who gets how much when the “reform” act starts to play.

Also, Trump’s Russia problems are going to get worse, not better, making him of almost no use to Ryan on “tax reform.” Likewise, the big money kids have to be assessing the reality that Trump is proving to be such a lazy and incompetent fool, so compromised by whatever the hell he was doing with the Russians and in so far over his head dealing with professional politicians and bureaucrats, that he can’t be factored as an asset to this coming tax scam.

If I were Ryan I’d be hitting the P90X workout several times a day. He’s going to need every endorphin he can squeeze up to survive the next farce.

Hell, if I were him I’d just hide in the gym.

 

 

Trump in Defeat Will Get More Erratic, Not Less.

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Among (quite a few) guilty pleasures is “Morning Joe”, MSNBC’s daily pundit Woodstock. Yeah, Joe Scarborough is a putz and a blowhard, and since it’s his name on the show, guests who are actually expert in serious things have to pretend to tolerate his stem-winding rants. But when Scarborough is modulated or (praise lord!) off on vacation, checking in with what “The Circus” boys, Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, “legendary” ex-newspaperman Mike Barnicle, etc. is a far better use of my super valuable morning time than the brain gelatinizing insipidness of “The Today Show” or “Good Morning America.”

Lately, ex-CIA and NSA chief Michael Hayden has been getting a lot of airtime. Tuesday morning, coming off FBI Director Jim Comey’s stunning yet-unsurprising revelation that Trump’s campaign has been under investigation since … late July, “Morning Joe’s” assembled deep thinkers were grasping for new and better ways to describe the unprecedentedness (an actual word, I looked it up) of a sitting president, two months in office!, being investigated for colluding (or “coordinating” if you’re Comey) with the friggin’ Russians to rig the election that got him where he is.

But it was Hayden, the old spy hand, who after handing it to the Russians for “the biggest W” in the history of espionage chicanery, posed the question of how this whole Trump-Russia thing began? As an old spy, he said, you always ask if what you’re seeing is the result of “malice or incompetence.”

Here the easy answer of course is, “a little of both.” But we can narrow that a bit. It was a marriage. The Russians brought the malice. Trump supplied the incompetence.

Incompetence, something a majority of voters recognized last November, is now a vivid, permanent reality that even The Wall Street Journal editorial page, akin to a Vatican declamatio to pious conservatives, has come to accept as a fact of life.

Say the cossetted white sages employed by Rupert Murdoch:

“If President Trump announces that North Korea launched a missile that landed within 100 miles of Hawaii, would most Americans believe him? Would the rest of the world? We’re not sure, which speaks to the damage that Mr. Trump is doing to his Presidency with his seemingly endless stream of exaggerations, evidence-free accusations, implausible denials and other falsehoods. … Two months into his Presidency, Gallup has Mr. Trump’s approval rating at 39%. No doubt Mr. Trump considers that fake news, but if he doesn’t show more respect for the truth most Americans may conclude he’s a fake President.”

It’s that intro that bothers me, because obviously it’s on the minds of anyone seriously watching the astonishing farce being played out hour-to-hour in D.C.. If Trump loses his Obamacare repeal tomorrow it will be a gut punch defeat. He will of course blame Paul Ryan and everyone down to the West Wing cleaning crew for what has been an object lesson in his incompetence and laziness. Is there a single person anywhere who honestly believes he has read or thoroughly educated himself on what Ryan’s six years-long piece of legislation will do? Of course not. All Trump wants is a bill — a victory — he can sign and wave in front of his next Red Cap rally, never mind that his shrieking fans are exactly the people getting the forced colonoscopy.

But to the Journal’s opening line. With the FBI on him, the details of his long Russian canoodle becoming more apparent every day, “health care reform” (insert laugh track here) about to spiral into a fiery grave and his approval rating dropping to George W. Bush levels, it is (very) likely Trump will become more erratic, not less.

So what is a solution to getting the media, Congress and most importantly the Red Cap Brigade to ignore all that “fake” noise and see him as The Great Leader? Well, a war of some kind might do it. And since we’re talking about a guy who only wins, a winnable war. With lots of “shock and awe”, only biglier.

The North Korean scenario is foremost on a lot of peoples’ minds because Kim Jong-un is another guy trapped in a corner, desperate and reckless. It’s another marriage made in hell. But if you need an excuse for distracting fireworks — Re: the latest TSA Homeland Security alert — a bomb on an airplane will do just about as well.

I’ve mentioned this before, because knowing what the intelligence agencies and the Pentagon know about Trump, their response to his pushing the button for military action is by no means a certainty.  Does anyone believe the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the permanent bureaucracies of the CIA and NSA haven’t thoroughly assessed the psychological fitness of their Commander-in-Chief? Are you certain they would comply with an order from … Donald Trump, oft-bankrupt casino developer, reality TV show host and inveterate liar … ordering them to place American troops and possibly the American public in harm’s way?

I’m as cynical as it gets about “aye-aye sir” toadyism and group-think, but I have an extremely hard time imagining characters like Admiral Mike Rogers (NSA) following go-to-war orders on Donald Trump’s say-so.

Trump style incompetence (born out of psychological dysfunction and laziness) may be exactly the grenade the Red Hat Brigade and tribal Republicans who rationalized him as a better choice than “crooked Hillary”, wanted rolled into DC when they pulled the lever for him in November. But I seriously doubt that quality of cynicism applies to the people who have to commit people under their command to possible death.

More to the point. As crazy and ridiculous as Trump-involved political events have been these past two months, it has been notably quiet in terms of international crises. Experience tells you such lulls are always broken.

How Would “House of Cards” Handle The Donald Problem?

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NEW BLOG PHOTO_edited- 3Not that any Hollywood screenwriter since Terry Southern could imagine a spectacle as bizarre and farcical as this. But I’m watching this week’s Trump meltdown, which is an extra melt you didn’t think possible after last week’s meltdown, and the sight of the ever loyal Republican herd trampling itself to avoid even mentioning (on camera) their party’s “presumptive nominee’s” name and thinking, “What would ‘House of Cards’ do with a toxic liability like The Donald?”

Amid chatter that Trump’s poll numbers are intolerable and predictions of a god almighty November gut punch to the conservative agenda, (you know, more guns, not so many gays and social service cuts for Hispanics), there are whispers of rules changes at the Ultimate Warcraft Nutzapalooza in Cleveland next month. One idea would free all of the delegates 17 candidates brawled over all winter and spring and allow them to vote for whoever they damned well please. The problem with that is besides setting off a civil war with Trump’s (not exactly rational and stable) people, a.k.a. every other Republican’s base, the Grand Old Party has no one to offer as a replacement. Well ok, maybe Ted Cruz, who would certainly leap at the opportunity and very likely send the party to an even worse defeat than Trump.

So … what to do?

Clearly something fully above board and traditional and proper is out of the question. No GOP wiseman is going to step up and say, “This guy is a [bleeping] disaster. I’m not going to support him.” Not even John McCain, who needs Trump’s pitchfork crowd to win reelection in Arizona. One reason is that there aren’t any “Republican wisemen”. Or there are they’re as rare as coelecanths and never expose themselves to sunlight. These are modern Republicans after all, i.e. salesmen and huckstersl.

But if life were to imitate Hollywood, the plotting would go something like this:  An envelope would be handed to one of Trump’s bouncers. Either Corey Lewandowski or Paul Manafort. Maybe by someone who bumps against them in a crowded elevator, slipping the envelope into their pocket and vanishing away when the doors open.

After first inspecting it for anthrax spores, the envelope would be opened. The message inside would be specific and blunt. It would lay out in unequivocal detail not just Trump’s  personal tax information, but incident after incident of his long history of financial fraud, leaving no doubt of that all such information will be disclosed, exposing him to not just reputational ruin, (I know, far too late for that) but full, bankruptcy-inducing criminal and civil prosecution as well. In short, catastrophic blackmail. His only option? Concede to demands freeing his delegates. Accept the inevitable defeat that follows on the convention floor and the nomination of someone else, Cruz or some other skin crawling replacement, and walk away.

But come on. That’s way too bureaucratic and not all that much fun. Worse, Trump’s still around. God knows who the guy’ll take down with him out of pure spite?

So, then there’s the option of him claiming to have experienced a severe health incident. Perhaps a heart attack from all those McDonalds lunches. The blackmailers would agree to support this fiction, under certain conditions. A tweet would go out that the presumptive nominee collapsed in the royal boudoir, leaving it to fervid imaginations that he clenched up while having world class sex with the super sexy Melania. He would be private jetted off to Mar a Lago, given “the greatest” cardiac care the world has ever known and remain essentially under house arrest recuperating until the day after the election.

Of course, were this a “House of Cards” script and Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey) orchestrating the plot, Trump would simply be a dead man.

The Donald would be slipped a toxic hamburger patty, go into cardiac arrest, maybe midway through one of his feverish apocalyptic fantasies about blood-sucking Muslims, and croak right there on “Fox and Friends”, before the nation’s startled but mostly relieved eyes. Because, as Frank (a Democrat, you know), would explain in one of his distinctive, fourth-wall breaking asides, the only way to truly escape the hell of someone like Trump, is to inflict upon him a total, indisputably final, (un)timely demise.

Only with the deathly bolus of The Donald irrevocably removed from the party body, could the Republican  leadership apparatus — the Koch brothers, Rush Limbaugh, Roger Ailes, and heavyweight donors like John Menard Jr. — be free to replace him with their anointed champion, which, given the way those guys operate could be anyone from Ted Cruz to the Sham Wow guy.

Now, if you, playing script doctor, want to replace the super sexy Melania with Claire Underwood (Robin Wright) locked in a deeply connived love nest with The Donald, I could buy that. I just can’t picture Claire touching a greasy hamburger patty.

 

 

What if Romney Picked Bachmann To Be His Running Mate? He Did.

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Congressman Paul Ryan comes across well.  He’s attractive, smiles a lot, wears the presidential uniform well, and has a ready string of impressive-sounding statistics on the tip of his tongue.

But beyond the candidate packaging, what does this guy stand for?

When trying to understand something new entering our lives, the natural tendency is to seek out a local point-of-reference.  For instance, when Minnesota Timberwolves fans recently asked “who the heck is Alexy Shved,” a player the Wolves’ brain trust acquired this summer, Wolves PR people explained “He’s the Russian Rubio,” referencing their talented point guard Ricky Rubio.

Whether or not the “Russian Rubio” description turns out to be an apt description of Shved’s ability and style of play, it connected with Minnesotans, because it took something unknown and linked it to something known.

So with the Russian Rubio example in mind, what’s the Minnesota parallel to Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan?

Since he’s a popular, moderate-feeling Republican, is he “the Wisconsin Jim Ramstad?”   Since the Beltway media often labels him a “serious” numbers guy, is he “the Wisconsin Arne Carlson?”

Try “the Wisconsin Michele Bachmann.” An analysis of congressional voting patterns by DW-Nominate found that Paul Ryan’s voting record is nearly identical to  Michele Bachmann’s, the local politician who most consistently embarrasses Minnesotans with her ideologically extreme positions.

(Incidentally, another analysis found that Ryan was the most extreme conservative vice presidential nominee — the furthest from the center — since at least 1900.)

Ryan’s tone may be less grating than Bachmann’s, but once you remove the packaging, his policies are almost identical to Michele Bachmann’s.  Paul Ryan is Michele Bachmann, just with more lip control and less lipstick.

Knowing that, ask yourself this question: “If Mitt Romney had chosen Michele Bachman for his running mate, would that make Minnesotans more or less likely to support Romney?”  Because, substantively, that is the question Romney has now effectively posed to Minnesotans, and Americans.

Though Michele Bachman continually gets reelected in one of the most conservative parts of Minnesota, she is remarkably unpopular with Minnesotans as a whole.  A January 2012 PPP survey found that only 34% of Minnesotans view her favorably, while 57% view her unfavorably.  She would get crushed by a whopping 23 points in a head-to-head race versus U.S. Senator Amy Kloubachar.

In other words, Governor Mitt Romney just picked the ideological twin of one of Minnesota’s least popular figures to join his ticket.  Good luck selling that in Minnesota.

– Loveland

Can Paul Ryan Put Wisconsin Into Play For Romney?

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The political whiz kids at the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog are reporting that Paul Ryan’s elevation to the national ticket has significantly improved Republicans’ chances of Romney winning in neighboring Wisconsin this November.  In fact, chances have almost doubled.

But before folks get too excited about that, they should look more closely at the prognostication.  Before the Ryan announcement, FiveThirtyEight put the odds of Romney winning Wisconsin at 12%.  Post-Ryan announcement, Romney’s chances rose to 20%. Here’s their reasoning:

Those improved odds are based on a two percentage point bonus that the model accounts for in the home state of each vice-presidential candidate — the average bump that a running mate has added since 1920, according to a previous FiveThirtyEight analysis.

But the effect a vice-presidential candidate has had on his or her home state has varied widely. Is there any inherent aspect to Wisconsin’s political geography that might provide clues as to whether Mr. Ryan will have a larger, or smaller, impact on the Nov. 6 vote in Wisconsin?

…

Mr. Ryan has not represented an overwhelmingly conservative district. It has leaned slightly to the right, but Mr. Obama was able to carry the First District in 2008, albeit, with just 51 percent of the vote. Winning a district doesn’t earn you any points if you lose the state, but Mr. Ryan’s ability to win easily in a not-so-easy area suggests that he has some skill in winning over a skeptical audience — at least in Wisconsin.

Both Gov. Scott Walker and Mr. Obama have net positive approval ratings in Wisconsin. That suggests that there is a group of true independent voters in the state, who can be influenced to vote for either Mr. Romney or Mr. Obama…

In other words, moving up to 20 percent is real improvement.  Wisconsin is no longer in the “snowball’s chance in Hell” category for Romney.  It’s now more like snowball’s chance in Packers Training Camp,” which merely feels like Hell to Minnesotans.

– Loveland

Pawlenty Can’t Compete With A Guy Who Cuts The Boss’s Tax Rate To 1%

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I must admit, I felt sorry for former Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty this weekend.

Governor Pawlenty traveled the country cheerleading for Mitt Romney.  He swallowed his pride and lavishly praised one of the least likeable presidential candidates in modern history, hoping to finally move up from Groomsman to Best Man.   He had the power tie Double Windsored, and was pumped to be on the Sunday talk shows, with the pundits predicting he was the frontrunner.

But alas, it was not to be.  Again.

Four years ago, when Pawlenty was passed up for Sarah Palin, he recalled this glum little scene somewhere on an Eagan cul de sac:

 Just after I got off the phone with McCain, I took our dog out for a walk so she could do her dog’s duty…As I put the little bag over my hand and bent down to pick up her poop, I thought to myself, Well, this is the only number two I’ll be picking up today.

But this time, Mr. Pawlenty should have seen the brush off coming.  After all, how in the world do you compete with a guy who cuts the boss’s tax rate to 1%?

Actually, 0.82%.  That’s the effective tax rate, Mathew O’Brien at The Atlantic points out, that millionare Mitt would pay under Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, instead of the 13.9% he paid under the Bush tax rates.  Now, a 14% tax rate for a multi-millionaire might seem plenty shameful to most of us, but Congressman Ryan was savvy enough to sweeten the deal, and win the race to the bottom.  The Atlantic explains:

 “How would someone with more than $21 million in taxable income pay so little? Well, the vast majority of Romney’s income came from capital gains, interest, and dividends. And Ryan wants to eliminate all taxes on capital gains, interest and dividends.”

In the Republican Party, “1% for the 1%” is a proposition that is nearly impossible to top.  It makes the hearts of millionaire candidates and Super PAC funders go pitter-patter.

So, Governor Pawlenty, as you bent over the family dog’s offering this weekend, I hope you took solace in the knowledge that this time you never stood a chance.

– Loveland